Is Your Game Crap? This Fan Will Fix It for You

Peter 'Durante' Thoman has made a name for himself fixing publishers' shoddy PC versions of popular games. Photo courtesy Peter Thoman

When Rising Star Games released Deadly Premonition: The Director’s Cut for the PC last month, the port of the Twin Peaks-esque cult favorite horror game had some serious issues. Chief among them was the fact that the game’s resolution was, highly atypically for a PC game, locked to 720p.

But in spite of their outrage, many users expressed hope for a savior to come to their aid. “You on it, Durante?” asked one user. Like a Batsignal, the call was out.

The answer came less than an hour later. “I should be able to fix this.”

The post came from Peter Thoman, better known by the handle Durante. A 29-year-old from Austria with a Ph.D. in computer science, Thoman first gained online notoriety in 2012 when he fixed a similar resolution issue with Namco Bandai’s PC port of its role-playing game Dark Souls. With Deadly Premonition’s PC version looking like a similar hackjob, players hoped Durante would do what the game’s publisher would not.

Sure enough, within 24 hours of the game’s release on Steam, Thoman had uploaded “DPfix 0.1 alpha,” a patch that allowed Deadly Premonition players to manually adjust the game’s resolution. Thoman tells WIRED that his process involves intercepting and logging the graphic rendering calls between the game and DirectX, then locating and adjusting the resolution buffer. In layman’s terms, he reverse-engineers from the graphical output, rather than the game’s source code, a way to adjust the resolution, wrapping up the fix into a convenient zip file.

“My primary motivation,” Thoman said, “is because I don’t like playing games at low resolution.”

When the news of Dark Souls’ locked resolution first came out, Thoman said he was incredulous. “I posted on GAF multiple times about how I couldn’t believe that the game will be resolution locked, how silly that would be and how it must be a translation error,” he said later in a NeoGAF post. “When I was proven wrong about that, and some people made up long reasons for why such a lock could be in place, I was irked. Someone was wrong on the internet, and it fell to me to set them straight.”

Thoman’s patches proved his point: There was nothing that required the games to be locked to a low resolution. But Thoman didn’t stop there. Since the original Premonition patch had broken a few things, he worked on fixing them. Then he started including options for adding anti-aliasing and increasing the rendering resolution of reflections, something he says improves the quality of the game’s depth-of-field effects.

“I also added the option to replace textures,” he said, “which allows other modders to make really interesting stuff, like high-resolution texture packs or other user-interface modifications. I always really like letting people do that.”

Rising Star Games’ Deadly Premonition ran at a low resolution on PC (as in the mirror at left), but displays well with Durante’s fix (right). Image: Peter Thoman

Thoman estimates he spent more than 70 hours patching the game in the two weeks following its release. The most recent DPfix release fixed pixel offset errors that occurred at higher resolutions, fixed anti-aliasing when it was not being correctly applied, added improved depth-of-field effects, and added an option for screen space ambient occlusion.

But if Thoman was able to crank out a fix so quickly, why hasn’t Rising Star created an official patch yet?

Hidetaka “Swery65″ Suehiro, the game’s director, tweeted an acknowledgement of the issues shortly after launch. Rising Star Games noted that a patch is on the way, but that adding in support for gamepad controllers (another major omission) would be its first priority.

(Rising Star declined to comment on this story.)

Thoman says the difference between his fixes and official patches are primarily an issue of quality assurance. “When I write and program something, I make sure I didn’t make any obvious errors, and then I just release it,” Thoman told WIRED. “If it works for 90 percent of people, I already consider that a success.”

From there, Thoman starts working for that other 10 percent, but he says that there’s probably one percent of people that he will never be able to help. If he were in charge of a commercial product rather than a fan-made patch, he’d have a responsibility to make sure whatever he released worked for everyone and didn’t break anything.

Still, it makes you wonder why companies would release such slapdash products in the first place. Thoman says that in his opinion, Dark Souls and Deadly Premonition weren’t really broken — they just went from game consoles to the PC without any enhancements. PC games don’t sell very well in Japan, he says, so when it comes time for a Japanese company to port a game to PC, they often underestimate what PC gamers expect in the way of features.

The community clearly appreciates Durante’s efforts. “Deadly Premonition will soon be the best example of how a community can help improve the quality of a game,” said one NeoGAF user.

Another GAF user even suggested he sell his services in the future to a Japanese company planning to port a game to PC. But while Thoman says he is intrigued by the ability to work with a game’s source code rather than having to reverse-engineer a solution, he’s happy in his day job as a university post-doc and isn’t terribly interested in the logistics of making something like that happen. For him, fixing companies’ crappy PC ports will stay a hobby.

“I do this for fun,” he said. “The more you do it as work, the less it will seem like fun.”